Parcly Taxel: While I was wisping away in my bottle, the temperature crept above freezing, so I woke up facing a bright sun shining upon the thinned but healthy wood of trees, residual snow melting to reveal the grasses and dirt underneath.
 
The phonotactics of Japanese are very restricted, including only one liquid consonant that is closer to r than l. This is the source of the common perception that Japanese tend to swap these two phonemes when speaking English, but Rainbow Dash has Japanese pegasi friends who can testify otherwise. As for me, after staying in Japan for a sufficiently long period of time I was already pronouncing the “grasses” I wrote above as “glasses”, among other things…
 
Spindle: Phoneme swapping might be funny, but it touches on a more serious issue facing the Japanese language: loanwords, most of them from English. Seventy years ago, around the time I was turned into a windigo and started exploring the world, calques with kanji were still routinely employed for new concepts, such as 回路 for an electric circuit. Now katakana abound and English is sometimes used without knowledge of its meaning. Despite this, my hope is for the beauty of pure Japanese to shine far into the future.
 
Parcly: Our next destination was Asahikawa, two hours away by train from Sapporo and in the middle of Hokkaido. Before setting off on my grand voyage I had received from Luna a ticket exchangeable for a Japan Rail Pass, valid on every line in the country. When I made the exchange, however, the servicemare took too long and I missed my intended train. Not to worry! Trains in Japan are timed to the second, and the next one left at exactly 12:00.
 
Spindle: We had lunch on the train, consisting of some snacks: onigiri, inari (sushi wrapped in beancurd skin) and cheese tarts. To my pleasant surprise the cabin was quiet enough to hear Parcly’s breath, which I froze into snowflakes for fun.
 
Asahikawa itself is laid upon a grid, and we could see nearly all the streets and pavements buried under ice when we arrived, though several mounds of snow had been shovelled aside. After finding an inn to place our belongings for the coming night, we set off for the Blue Pond (青い池) 40 kilometres away, one of the most mystical places in all of Japan.
 
Parcly: As I trotted along the main road leading to the pond, golden rays of sunset shot across the sky and then faded away into a dark purple night. The flanking scenery morphed from buildings to snow-covered fields to white forests; street lamps also stopped somewhere and were replaced by reflective arrows that were only visible when my lighted horn shone on them.
 
Blue lights marked the final approach under the moon and stars, but Spindle was the first to exclaim:
 
The Blue Pond is frozen over!
 
Spindle: And what a treat it was! I whisked myself under one of the toothpick-like trees and struck a pose, which Parcly drew. There was a light show going on around the pond’s edge, highlighting various lines of trees, which added to the atmosphere. As a windigo, the other visitors to the site didn’t really care about me, since I could re-freeze whatever parts of the lake I broke through.
 
Parcly: Even the big bowl of ramen I had for dinner afterwards paled in significance. To see such a picturesque location in that state was enough to make our day.